Book Review: Ready Player Two

 

Ready Player Two

by Ernest Cline

There were many things I enjoyed in this book, but I can’t say that the first 30% of the book held any of them.

I realize that the author was giving the story that happened between the first book and the current one, building the bridge, but it felt like the story didn’t even begin until 30% of the way in. From my perspective, the first thirty percent of the book could have been seriously condensed, at least in half. And, honestly, there seemed a lot more telling than showing throughout the book. It just didn’t seem as immediate or make me feel invested.

I was so excited to get this book, and maybe that’s part of the problem. Sometimes we hype things up in our mind, like a movie, then it simply can’t live up to our expectations. In the end I did enjoy the book, but it took a while to get into it.

There were MANY parts I did enjoy, such as the John Hughes films portion. This harkened back to the 80s nostalgia of the first book, as well as the planet of the artist formerly known as Prince. I really appreciated the development of Aech’s story there. The thread of Kira and Ogden Morrow’s love throughout the book was lovely.

I was a little surprised by the use of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works, because it wasn’t an 80’s creation, but it was so incredibly important in the development of D&D and then the online gaming that grew out of that, that it really made sense.

If you enjoyed the first book, then this one is worth reading, but you may have to slog through the first part to get to the good stuff.

Science Fiction and the Nebula Awards

I’ve always been a fan of Science Fiction. I don’t remember what sparked my interest. Perhaps it was my older brothers, listening to Star Wars and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the radio and watching Dr. Who on television. My father gave me a copy of Dune when I was around seventh or eighth grade because my oldest brother had introduced him to it, and he thought I might like it. It became one of my favorites.

When I went to college, I found that the local public library had a wonderful collection of science fiction and fantasy. I think it was there that I discovered Steven Brust’s Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grill and Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon series.

There are a wide variety of sub genre’s when it comes to Sci-fi. Some science fiction deals with hard sciences and soft sciences, like physics and anthropology respectively. Time travel and alternate histories may comprise some of the earliest science fiction, with H.G. Wells The Time Machine. There are space westerns like Joss Whedon’s Serenity, based on the short lived Firefly series. Apocalyptic fiction has always been of intense interest and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down, particularly as we are now in 2012, the end of the longest cycle in the Mayan calendar.

My reading interests have expanded and I don’t read as much science fiction these days. There’s less time in my schedule for reading and what I do read is spread over more genres. I decided to go for a browse through our library’s science fiction and fantasy section to see if something leapt off the shelf at me.

A series of books that I remember fondly from my time in college is the Nebula Award series. Each book offered up a feast of different science fiction and fantasy stories. They nourished me then and continue to influence me in subtle ways. The Night We Buried Road Dog by Jack Cady, the 1993 novella winner, lives on in my memory almost like a ghost. At the Rialto by Connie Willis, 1989 best novelette, plays like a wisp of music in my mind. Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson, 1991 best short story, chuckles gently somewhere in the night.

I picked up the Nebula Awards 27, edited by James Morrow, which offers a selection of the award winners and nominees for 1991. Some titles jumped out at me, though I don’t remember much about the stories. Standing in Line with Mr. Jimmy by James Patrick Kelly, They’re Made out of Meat by Terry Bisson, Precessing the Simulacra for Fun and Profit by Bruce Sterling and Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, all jogged a memory.

Standing in Line with Mr. Jimmy by James Patrick Kelly introduces Chip. He’s a small time junkie with a yen for flash but he’s been caught on a parole violation and is being sent to work on a road gang in Mexico. A mysterious man offers him a way out but can’t tell him what’s at the other end of the line. Can Jimmy think fast enough to find an alternative to Mexico and the end of the line?

They’re Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson is a funny little story told entirely in dialogue between two space exploring beings discussing the fact that humans (a.k.a. “sentient meat”) want to make contact. They quickly decide against it and leave.

Precessing the Simulacra for Fun and Profit by Bruce Sterling is not actually a science fiction story at all, but rather an essay about the author’s experiences with literary criticism as a member of the outcast science fiction writing crowd.

In Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress, genetic engineering makes it possible to choose many facets of a child before they are even born, including turning off the need to sleep. There doesn’t seem to be a down side to the difference, but as Leisha grows up, a significant divide develops between the “sleepers” and “sleepless.” Is mutant too strong a word?

The wonderful thing about the Nebula Award books is that they let you experience different writers and different sub-genres of science fiction in a compact format, and an award winning one at that. This, theoretically, is the cream of the crop. It is called speculative fiction for a reason. Pick one up and give your brain some food for thought.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
By Douglas Adams

Few people realize that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was actually first written as a radio series and broadcast starting in 1978 on BBC radio.  The first book didn’t come out until fall of 1979.  Since then, it has had a long and varied life.  (If you’ve seen the modern movie, please don’t judge it by that.  While it’s entertaining to some degree, it comes nowhere near the brilliance and humor of the radio series or book.)

Of course, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is also a book within the book.  Its major selling point is that on the front of it, in large friendly letters, is written Don’t Panic.  The guide is quoted frequently. 

It includes tips on the use of a towel for interstellar travel, such as wetting it for hand-to-hand combat, or wrapping it around your head to “avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a brush, but very, very ravenous.” 

Or the entry which mentions how ballpoint pens escape, “… it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid life-style, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent of the good life.”

The story begins on Earth.

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

Things get better, but only momentarily.

“...one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.  This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”  Sadly, the Earth is demolished before she can get to a phone.

Before the actual demolition, our antiheroes make their appearance.  Arthur Dent is having a really bad day.  He’s just found out that his house is slated to be demolished to make way for a bypass.  Then he finds out his best friend, Ford Prefect, is not even from Earth and the Earth is slated to be demolished for an interstellar bypass.  Luckily he and Ford manage to hitch a ride on the ship come to do the job.  Of course, they later get tossed off the ship but they do, very improbably, get picked up by Ford’s distant cousin Zaphod and his girlfriend Trillian. 

Zaphod has stolen the ship they are on, which runs on the Infinite Improbability Drive. This drive causes very improbable things to happen when in use, such as calling into existence a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias high over a planet. 

Trillian is also a girl who Arthur, very improbably, happened to hit on at a party years before when her name was Tricia McMillan.  Along with an incredibly depressed robot named Marvin, “And then of course I’ve got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side,” they go in search of legendary Magrathea, where Earth was planned and built, paid for by the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings Earthlings know as mice. 

Full of humor and pithy sayings, like “Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so,” this is not the type of book that you will ever pick up and wonder if you’ve already read it.  It is the type of book you will want to read again though.

The library offers both the books and the original radio drama on CD.  Though containing the same main story, they are different enough that I highly recommend checking out both.  My husband and I took the CDs for a very enjoyable ride to Massachusetts and back one year.